Episode #017 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Try to imagine yourself trapped in a prison cell, convicted to death, no chance of an appeal, and you know you’re going to die soon in some horrific, painful way for something that you didn’t even do. If you were in that situation, how would you spend your time? This isn’t just me being dramatic. Really try to put yourself in that situation and ask yourself what would be important to you in that moment. Boethius was a medieval, Neoplatonist philosopher who found himself in that moment. Up until that point, he really had a pretty good standing in the world—well, considering he was living in a society that was growing increasingly corrupt and intolerant by the day. I mean, the Roman empire was crumbling at the time. I guess as modern people we can look back and see where all that was heading, but the people of the time didn’t know that. Boethius didn’t know that.

And to top it off, the entire peninsula of Italy was controlled by a group of wonderful gentlemen known as the Ostrogoths. Let me tell you about who Boethius ended up working for. Let me tell you about the Ostrogoths. They were led by a guy named Theodoric the Great. Now, just to get an idea of the types of moves this guy would pull in the interest of gaining and sustaining power, let me just tell you about how he took control of Italy in the first place. He was fighting an army led by a guy named Odoacer. Theodoric wins a couple battles just so that Odoacer gets on his back foot a little bit. And right when he’s in this place of vulnerability, a bishop acts as a mediator between the two leaders and arranges this meeting and negotiation for a peace treaty. Theodoric agrees to a treaty where both of them would occupy the area together and both would make decisions. It would be kind of a joint ruling: they would combine their forces, and they’d have a period of peace in the region.

So, they come to an arrangement. Theodoric calls a celebratory banquet. We’re all going to sit down. We’re going to have a feast and revel in this new agreement that we have. Everybody’s going to be happy. Well, at the banquet, Theodoric stands up. He makes a toast. You know, he does a little clink-y thing on his glass, and then he stabs Odoacer in the neck. It says in a text called the Anonymous Valesianus that right after Theodoric kills him, “That same day, all of Odoacer’s army who could be found anywhere were killed by order of Theodoric, as well as all of his family. Odoacer’s wife, Sunigilda, was stoned to death. And his brother, Onoulphus, was killed by archers while seeking refuge in a church. Theodoric exiled Odoacer’s son Thela to Gaul, but when he attempted to return to Italy, Theodoric had him killed too.” Now, this guy is the ruler of everything. But more importantly, he is Boethius’ boss. This is the guy he’s an advisor to.

It’s kind of funny, Boethius’ life resembles a common theme in Hollywood and pop culture. There’s tons of examples, but the example that comes to mind for me is The Prince of Egypt. Which, by the way—highly underrated DreamWorks movie, and even more underrated soundtrack—beautiful songs on it. But I think for this show, that reference might be a little obscure, and really it doesn’t matter. We’ve all heard the story of Boethius told in some capacity. He was orphaned at a very young age and was adopted by a rich, aristocratic family. And this privileged upbringing yielded a top-level education for his extremely above-average brain. And this warranted him eventually being given a job as the chief advisor to Theodoric the Great.

Now, the reason why his upbringing is significant is because he led a very privileged life. And one typical hallmark of a person who was spoiled rotten all throughout their childhood is that they don’t appreciate anything. And look, I’m not saying Boethius was by any means the extreme version of this. It’s not like he belonged on My Super Sweet 16. But it’s not crazy to think that there were some remnants of it still in Boethius’ mind, remnants that were later removed by this unjust sentencing to death. In fact, let me just tell you about how Boethius ended up in prison in the first place.

There was a meeting of the royal council in Verona where a guy named Cyprianus accused a guy named Albinus of treason. But neither of these guys are really important. The important part is what Boethius did. He was a loyal guy. He came to Albinus’ defense and tried to show everyone how flawed their way of thinking was. He tried to shine light upon their delusions. He said, “The charge of Cyprianus is false, but if Albinus did that, so also have I and the whole senate with one accord done it; it is false, my Lord King.”

Now, this is the part of the movie where everybody’s supposed to look at each other, start nodding to each other knowingly in complete silence. They’re supposed to be like, “Oh, yeah, he’s right. He’s right, you guys! Look at how far we’ve fallen. Thank you, Boethius. Thank you for bringing us back down to earth.” You know, one person starts clapping really slow. But that’s not what happened. Instead they just go, “Alright, so I guess Boethius is guilty too. Take him away.” Didn’t work out that well.

So, all of a sudden, Boethius finds himself convicted to death, stripped of everything: stripped of his home, his family, his work, and now even his freedom. From there on out, his existence consisted of him sitting in this dark cell, wrongly accused of treason, just waiting to be put to death. And this is why I asked that question at the top of the show. If for some reason I was wrongly convicted to death, I mean, I’d be a lot of things. I’d be angry. I’d be, well, probably weeping. I mean, to be honest, I’d probably be like one of those prisoners in the Pirates of the Caribbean; I got the bone outside of the cage just trying to coax the dog over with the keys. One thing’s for sure, I certainly wouldn’t be writing a philosophical text that solves one of the oldest problems in philosophy and thereby paves the way for all subsequent medieval philosophy. So, why did he do it? Why did Boethius do it?

Most of the writing from Boethius before he’s convicted to death are commentaries on Aristotle. And besides that, it’s not a lot of original work. It’s usually other commentaries on random subjects or other Greek philosophers. Why did he choose to start now? What I think is that when you unjustly have everything taken away from you, including your life—for Boethius, that process was so traumatic that it was only after he was removed from that largely privileged life up until that point that he truly understood the value of philosophy. The book he wrote waiting for death is called The Consolation of Philosophy, because philosophy consoles us within that adversity that the world inevitably throws our way.

The book starts out really, really dark, like, depressing. Boethius is ready to die. He’s sad. He’s angry. He’s all the things that I would be and, really, he’s all the things you’d expect somebody to be if they were going to be wrongly put to death. But remember, this is just a character in a book. The real Boethius is writing the book. He’s in a completely different mental state than the guy in the book. Now, in the book, when Boethius is sitting in his cell, wallowing in his own misery, complaining about his situation, he looks up and sees this woman standing there, towering over him.

But it’s not just a woman. It’s a really strange woman. She has all these weird characteristics. Her height keeps fluctuating. She has this really strange glow about her. But more importantly, Boethius notices that she has Greek letters sewn into her dress, like embroidered letters. He looks at the top of her dress, and it’s the letter Theta. The bottom of her dress, she has the letter Pi. He also notices that she’s carrying a stack of books in one hand and a scepter in the other hand. Personally, I always think of the statue of liberty to try to remember her. Well, this strange woman is known as Lady Philosophy. The letter Theta sewn into the top of her dress—that symbolizes the metaphysics branch of philosophy; and the letter Pi down at the bottom symbolizes the branch of ethics. She’s supposed to be a physical embodiment of philosophy. She’s also supposed to be the physical embodiment of wisdom to Boethius.

Remember, Boethius was a Neoplatonist. This Lady Philosophy serves the same purpose to Boethius as Socrates served to Plato in his dialogues—the quintessential wise person, and the true philosophy of the author. Boethius stays humble throughout this book, though. Whenever you watch QVC or any one of those TV sales channels, they always pair up two people that would never actually be friends in real life. They’re the most dissimilar people in the world. There’s always one guy for some reason that knows absolutely everything about this rice cooker that he’s trying to sell you. Like, he knows a creepy amount about that rice cooker. And the other guy that he’s talking to always knows nothing about anything. He’s managed to navigate the world throughout his entire life. He’s managed to tie his shoes every morning. Yet he’s never even heard of rice before, let alone tried to cook it. And this rice cooker is the greatest thing he’s ever seen.

Well, in The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius is the quintessential naïve half of this equation, and Lady Philosophy is the quintessential wise person who’s educating him on his wrong thinking. The irony is that both of them are actually Boethius. Throughout the book he lays out a lot of great stuff. Not all of it is new, revolutionary stuff. But all of it is written in a very satisfying way. The stuff that was revolutionary is enough to make him the most influential philosopher of the time period.

But before we hear the infinite wisdom of Lady Philosophy, we need to talk about Aristotle. One of the most famous works by Aristotle, and one that’s been talked about a lot in recent years, is his work called On Interpretation. Now, Boethius and many later philosophers respond to this work directly. And now seems like the best time to talk about it on our show. I mean, if we talked about it back when we did the episode on Aristotle, if I referenced it now, it would just be a vague memory. But it’s actually very important that we understand where Aristotle was coming from. The thing we’re going to talk about is sometimes known as Aristotle’s Sea Battle analogy.

The big question that Aristotle addresses in this part of On Interpretation is the question of—Are things predestined and out of our control, or do we as humans get to choose what we do? What Aristotle says is that nobody would disagree that there are statements that can be directly contradictory to each other—two people holding opposite viewpoints where one of them has to be true and one of them has to be false. You could think of a million different examples of this. But the one that Aristotle uses is that one person says there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and the other person says there won’t be a sea battle tomorrow. Now, one of these has to be true. There either will be a sea battle tomorrow or there won’t be.

And because it’s the type of contradiction where one guy has to be right and the other guy has to be wrong, the statement is just as true now as it will be tomorrow when it actually happens or doesn’t happen. If it’s true that there is going to be a sea battle tomorrow, you could say that there needs to be a sea battle tomorrow. You could say that there is no situation possible where there can’t be a sea battle tomorrow because that statement is true right now. The implications of this is that nothing at all is possible except for what actually happens.

Now, this is an ancient Greek, very Aristotelian way of looking at something else that’s a lot more familiar to us in modern times. In the times of Boethius, the popular belief was that God knows what will happen tomorrow. He knows everything. He knows whether the sea battle will or will not take place. But if that’s true, how much control do we really have over our actions? Last episode we talked about Saint Augustine and his explanation for how it’s possible that a supernatural God can exist and still allow evil to happen in the world. His answer, if you remember, has to do with free will. God wanted and created a world where humans possess free will.

Saint Augustine said that if that’s the case, then evil is something we need to be willing to accept as a possibility. I mean, it’s not that God wants evil to happen. It’s not that he couldn’t stop things from taking place. It’s just that if he did, it would blow the whole system. Then people don’t have free will anymore. And how can you eternally judge someone based on something other than immoral actions taken based on their own volition?

Now, Boethius had all of this information. Boethius answers the question of “How can we be said to have free will if God already knows what we’re going to do in the future?” by making a distinction between divine foreknowledge and predestination. When I first read Boethius, this changed the way I looked at things. What Boethius says is that there is a huge difference between God knowing something will happen and God pre-slating out everything that will happen, and we have no control over it. But that’s just part of what Boethius says. We need to be clear on this, though. God’s knowledge of things that have happened, are happening, or will happen is a different thing than God forging a destiny for everyone ahead of time that they can’t deviate from. Knowing something will happen doesn’t predestine it to happen.

Now, if you’re a really smart person and you’re quick at thinking, you might say that, well, once we’ve made that distinction, why are we even here? Let’s say God only knows what you’re going to do before you do it. Why not just have judgment day on the first day of existence? I mean, he already knows whether you’re going to follow the rules well enough to be admitted into the country club. Doesn’t that just make our free will a bunch of smoke and mirrors that aren’t really necessary? Well, Boethius would argue that “everything is known not according to itself but according to the capacity of the knower.”

The way we can apply this brilliant concept to what we’re talking about with free will right now is by understanding that we perceive everything in the world through the lens of being a human being. That human interpretation of things may be useful to us in a lot of ways, but it would be naïve to think that it’s the complete picture of anything. I mean, just how a goldfish might look out of its fishbowl and think that your living room is the rest of the ocean, human beings might misperceive things too. Now, what Boethius says we’re the most guilty of misperceiving is the nature of time.

Remember, Saint Augustine said that time doesn’t really exist. It’s a human construct that we use to categorize information about the world around us. Well, Boethius agreed, but he said that because as humans we live in a constant flux of past, present, and future, we think about time in a very narrow way. We think about it in terms of things that have happened, things that are happening now, and things that are going to happen. But God, on the other hand, as Saint Augustine said as well, exists outside of time. He lives inside of an eternal present. Maybe a better way to think of it would be to think about it in terms of how you interact with things that are in the present right now.

If you and your friend decide one day that you’re going to get in shape—you guys are going to go start jogging—and you’re jogging along with your friend, and you start to get lightheaded; you start to feel sick, visions of Hot Pockets and cupcakes swirling around in your head—your friend’s knowledge that you are jogging right now in this moment doesn’t change your ability to stop jogging, bend over, and throw up all over the pavement. Just like that’s the interaction in this present moment, God’s knowledge of your future doesn’t stop you from changing it. He lives in an eternal present.

Now, if you still disagree, don’t worry. The centuries go by, and you start being more and more right. But try to appreciate the brilliance at work here. Boethius was wrongly convicted to death, rotting in a cell, writing about these imaginary conversations he’s having with this Lady Philosophy. I mean, in fact, right now is a good time to talk about how Boethius says philosophy serves to console us in times of hardship.

So, as I said before, The Consolation of Philosophy starts out with Boethius really depressed and sad. He goes on and on about it. I mean, he’s a little bit like Eeyore. And then Lady Philosophy—the wise Owl of Winnie the Pooh—swoops on in and corrects his faulty ways of thinking that are leading to this place of suffering that he’s in. She asks him what’s wrong. He tells her about the meeting and the wrongful conviction and the unjust tyrants that took away everything from him—his wealth, his home, his career, and ultimately his life. And Lady Philosophy, at least in her own way, just kind of scoffs at him. She sees his situation. She hears what he has to say, and she still doesn’t see any reason to be acting like Eeyore right now.

She says to Boethius, “If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with the unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion.”

Now, to Boethius, when bad things happen and we allow them to affect us, we are wallowing in our bad fortune, our misfortunes. When I think of fortune, I think of Las Vegas, Nevada. Beautiful city. It’s a place I really wish I could go again. And I’m not even that much into the whole prostitution scene or the main-lining drugs scene. And if you’ve ever been there for a few days, you might have had a similar experience to me. I walked into the various casinos on the first day I got there. And I see the people, the sea of people, playing the slot machines. And I think, “Wow, I mean, this is awesome! All these people have hope, you know? Maybe it’ll be me that hits that big jackpot. Sure, the casino strictly regulates the payout that the slot machines do. And yes, I know the odds are heavily against me. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll be the lucky one.”

But with each day that passes, and the slot machines are still packed with people, and you start to see some with a look of almost desperation in their eyes, you start to see people doing all these weird, superstitious things, attributing winning and losing to things other than chance. You know, like, oh, I just didn’t have my lucky rabbit’s foot on the outside of my clothes. That’s why I lost that one. You see the casino handing out free drinks to all the people gambling. Maybe you see the same person from yesterday on the same machine. And it looks like they’ve been there every day for the past decade. I found myself feeling less excited about that collective sense of hope, and I started feeling sorry for some of these people. And as I was walking around, all the casinos post signs that give out the number to the Problem Gambling hotline. They might be legal obligated to do that, but they still do it.

Well, Boethius would say, we all need to call that Problem Gambling hotline. But it’s not because we’re all playing the Kitty Cat slot machine too much. It’s because we share the same delusional expectation of nothing but good fortune in our everyday lives. When Boethius is sulking in his cell and complaining about his loss of good fortune, Lady Philosophy tells him that fortune is like a wheel—a wheel of fortune. The things that he had considered good fortune weren’t actually things that he had at all—his health, his freedom, his house, his clothes. These things don’t actually belong to him, so how can they be taken away from him? And besides, his situation is far from the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone.

I mean, even as he waits in his cell, Lady Philosophy points out that he still has tons of fortune. She points to his ability to reason and his ability to write his ideas down. In fact, when you add up everything honestly, even if you’re sentenced to death, how can you really say that you aren’t on the net-positive side of fortune? Boethius says, “Balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure? But you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away.”

Some people might see this as a warming-over of Buddhism or stoicism, and there really are a lot of similarities. But to put it in terms of a wheel of fortune that’s constantly giving and taking away all the earthly things that we see as good really makes me think of myself as no different than the people playing the slots in Las Vegas. Except while they’re using disposable vacation income, I’m wagering my own happiness.

The bottom line was this, if you follow philosophy to a tee, you are impervious to all these misfortunes in the world. The real thing you should focus on is virtue. Virtues are the tools you use to achieve happiness. Boethius said, “One’s virtue is all that one truly has because it’s not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.” In fact, it’s the types of things that humans would typically see as bad fortune that’s actually the greatest fortune, because it’s that fortune that does the most good for the person in the long run that’s receiving it. The things we see as good fortune are actually pretty deceptive because they allow us to delude ourselves into thinking that we are truly happy, when in actuality these conditions are extremely fragile. At least misfortunes show us how bad things could be and, therefore, how good we currently have it.

Boethius says, “All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.”

Now it’s time for the question of the week. There’s a famous adaptation of a quote by Plato that says, we can easily forgive the child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy is the adult who is afraid of the light. I feel a little bit like the adult that was afraid of the light recently. I was too afraid to quit my job and just realized that it really wasn’t that dangerous in reality. So, philosophize this: is there anything you’re currently scared of that really is just a shadow on a cave wall? Sometimes things look completely different when they have Plato’s light shining on them.

Thank you for everything. Talk to you soon.